The hearings are not going well for the little doctor.  His coworkers, some of whom thought the Covid virus was engineered in a lab, were shut out of meetings according to sworn testimony before Congress.  Others who expressed their professional opinions that the virus could not have sprung from nature, got grants and millions in funding.  Soon, they did a 180 degree turn.  The little guy must be apoplectic that this has been aired publicly.  There are probably conference calls where everyone tries to get their stories straight.  Hopefully, it all comes out.

If you haven’t heard the speech Trump gave at the C-PAC gathering, I recommend it.  When you search for it online you’ll get Jimmy Kimmel and the View’s take, and it’ll make you mad. What is it with these search engines that bring up negative results about what you’re looking for?  Anything about Trump, and the mainstream just sneers.  Careful how you search, or you’ll come up with “pack of lies.”  Sure, the guy exaggerates for effect, but then we realize that’s what is going on and find it enjoyable.  Unless you just hate him, his vision of America moving forward is pretty inspiring, and often funny.

Apparently the Silicon Valley Bank has gone under.  A financial guru (who I never watch) advised his viewers to buy stock in the Silicon Valley Bank one month ago.  That was about the time when the principals were bailing out.  Now the bank has gone bust.  How can he keep a career in financial advice going?  With any luck, he can’t.  Will there be a contagion that rips through other financial institutions?  You can’t be on the internet without coming across all kinds of urgent financial warnings.  Today’s Drudge Report features a headline with a hundred dollar bill on fire.  

Checking on the news requires that you brace yourself.  Saudi Arabia is burying the hatchet with Iran, in negotiations brokered by the Chinese.  That would seem to complicate matters.

The news from Ukraine doesn’t look encouraging.  We still don’t have definitive proof as to who blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.  If it was done by the U. S. without Germany’s permission, things might get very complicated.  

I personally don’t believe what most news is telling us.  You see the January 6 footage that has recently been released, and you see that people were reverently sight-seeing in the Capitol.  We see the so-called Q-anon shaman being escorted down hallways by police.  He was facing 20 years, and was intimidated into accepting four, apparently without the benefit of the video we’ve all seen.  It looks as though we’ve got a full court press against everything we hold dear.  They’ve been deceiving everybody they can, and call the rest of us a lot of names.  

A couple of years ago my friend Murray Allatt told me that they were detonating perfectly good power plants in Australia.  Well, the trend has reached the U. S.  The public better not let this happen but that is apparently what’s planned, starting in New Mexico.  It’s green or bust.  We all know that these planet-saving energy sources are iffy at best.  But the green buffoons want to make sure there’s no going back.  This should be interesting!  

We hope that the U. S. can survive the onslaught, but who knows?  There’s going to be hell to pay for the many lies, the outright deception of those who purport to inform us. 

Mark

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The post Weekly Update by Mark Armstrong – March 10, 2023 first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Maybe you’ve heard, it’s freezing in Texas. Not only that, but the wind is blowing hard enough to change lanes for you when driving. It’s too early to assume we’ll ever hear the truth but, why is the power out? The wind? I guess the wind didn’t blow when we were kids. In talking to someone who grew up here, as opposed to regular visits and extended stays, did this ever happen when we were kids back in the ‘60’s? Speaking for myself, I don’t ever remember the power going out at all, let alone for the long spells we’re enduring now. It’s a good thing the power is on at the office, or nobody would be here. There’s still a long list of places where the power hasn’t been restored, and my place is on it.  

The first reaction is to blame the fact that a growing percentage of the Texas power grid is now supplied by solar panels and wind mills. But windmills don’t work if the wind is blowing too hard, and they use diesel engines to get them going. Solar panels don’t work when covered by snow, but the “planet” can’t get saved without them.  

Where are they made, and with what? These buffoons saving the planet ought to try standing outside for a few minutes. It wouldn’t take much longer. This saving the planet exercise was definitely not designed for an Arctic blast. Or coincidental power outages.

Remember the snow and ice that didn’t melt for days on end two years ago? We remember. But global warming is still all the rage. I’d like to see them trot out some of that claptrap right about now, in Dallas or Houston. It seems that extreme cold might be the greater danger to life and limb. The people extolling the virtues of global warming action are headed to someplace closer to the equator where they can talk about climate change among themselves, where there are no contradictions just outside.

My son Michael has contracted for some beautiful ads in our local paper. They offer The Real Jesus and issues of 21^st Century WATCH. The response will determine whether we buy space in other newspapers.  Billboards are also something we’re talking about. I’m dreaming of one that says, “Go SAVE some other planet,  you’ve done enough damage here.”

Zelensky begged Congress for money this week, and apparently got a standing ovation. I turn away every time he shows up, and apparently a lot of the members of Congress had something better to do. I’ve seen his pleas, but very little in the way of accounting for all the money. You don’t suppose the hurricane victims in Florida could use a little help? No, they’re too busy starting World War III in Ukraine, and the U. S. wants to be a player.   Never mind that Ukraine has been made virtually uninhabitable, it’s probably Trump’s fault. Ukraine will need more money, and more money and then some more. Nothing else matters, except saving the planet.  Even that might take second place to Ukraine.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but we’re not going to hold services this week on account of the dangerously COLD temperatures. Without a working heater or several layers of ski apparel, the human body simply couldn’t be expected to survive. It’s that cold. We’ll have to wait and see if the power is restored. It’s probably cold where you are too.  Hope you don’t have a battery car.  

The upshot of all the Twitter releases seems to be that the top law enforcement agencies were the ones getting people unplugged. NOBODY disputed the narrative without punishment. So what do you call it when the government is using third parties to do things they can’t lawfully do? It seems like Twitter was doing the government’s bidding, and why would that be? Who has regulatory power over these platforms? That might be the answer.  

One can only hope the United States survives another two years of this demented pretender. If something goes sideways, he’s done. Anybody heard of the infamous laptop? We’ve known about it for two years, despite the vaunted law enforcement agencies saying it was Russian disinformation. How did those Russians get in that sensory deprivation tank at the rehab center and…  It’s absurd.

And the 1.7 trillion! Apparently this uninhibited spending spree is set to continue throughout the coming year, nothing anybody can do now. Are they going to collapse the county, on purpose?  

Saving the planet from global warming, or now climate change, is equally absurd. God will decide the future of the planet. These bozos are messing with the power, in more ways than one.

Mark

The post Weekly Update by Mark Armstrong – December 23, 2022 first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The post Weekly Update by Mark Armstrong – September 23, 2022 first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Somehow, Germany, a country where the government is firmly committed to “green” energy, is preparing to fire up coal-burning power plants. The move is even more remarkable given that officials stubbornly refuse to restart mothballed nuclear facilities, or even reconsider the timeline for retiring those that remain online. It’s an astonishing situation for a country that very recently boasted that it would soon satisfy all its energy needs with sunshine and cool summer breezes.

“A bill providing the legal basis to burn more coal for power generation is now making its way through parliament, aiming to boost the output of so-called reserve power plants that are irregularly used for grid stabilization and were scheduled to go offline over the next few years,” Deutsche Welle noted this week. “German Economy Minister Robert Habeck recently described his current energy policy as ‘a sort of an arm wrestling match’ with Russian President Vladimir Putin” the story added in reference to Russia reducing natural gas flows to countries that imposed sanctions after the invasion of Ukraine.

No doubt, Putin’s retaliation against Western Europe hiked the price of energy and raised worries about dark months to come followed by a cold winter. But, like American gas price woes, Germany’s problems predate the war in Ukraine and are closely linked to the goals the country’s political class made about their energy future in the absence of a realistic plan for getting there. In 2011, after an earthquake and tsunami triggered a disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, the German government recommitted itself to closing all of its nuclear plants and getting its electricity from solar and wind. The decision was motivated by public fears of nuclear power, but also by loud insistence that the energy source had no place in a sustainable future.

“Germany is going to be ahead of the game on that and it is going to make a lot of money, so the message to Germany’s industrial competitors is that you can base your energy policy not on nuclear, not on coal, but on renewables,” Greenpeace’s Shaun Burnie told the BBC at the time.

But “nuclear power is very close to the same shade of green as that of most renewables” when you compare mining and manufacturing inputs to each approach, energy expert Gail H. Marcus wrote for Physics World in 2017. And nuclear is reliable—the sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t always blow, which means electricity produced by those sources ebbs and flows. That’s a big problem for electrical grids that require steady supplies of energy.

“Large amounts of intermittent electricity create huge swings in supply which the grid has to be able to cope with,” Bloomberg reported in January 2021. “The issue isn’t confined to Europe. Australia has had teething problems in the transition to a cleaner network. Wind power was blamed for a blackout in 2016 that cut supply to 850,000 homes. The nation is looking to storage as a solution and was the first country to install a 100 megawatt megabattery in 2017.”

Months later, the challenge for renewable energy grew even worse when Europe suffered a “wind drought” that left turbines idled.

“Through summer and early autumn 2021, Europe experienced a long period of dry conditions and low wind speeds,” Hannah Bloomfield, a climate researcher at the University of Bristol, wrote in October 2021. “The beautifully bright and still weather may have been a welcome reason to hold off reaching for our winter coats, but the lack of wind can be a serious issue when we consider where our electricity might be coming from.” Bloomfield emphasized that a reliable flow of energy required “other renewable resources such as solar, hydropower and the ability to smartly manage our electricity demand.”

Of course, until you have sufficient diverse sources of renewable and reliable energy on which to draw, you’re going to keep the lights on through now-disfavored but reliable means such as coal, nuclear, and natural gas. But if you’re Germany and in a revived cold war with Russia, which is the major source of your natural gas, your options are limited when that country closes the valves on the pipelines.

“Europe’s biggest economy is now officially running short of natural gas and is escalating a crisis plan to preserve supplies as Russia turns off the taps,” CNN noted June 23. “Germany on Thursday activated the second phase of its three-stage gas emergency program, taking it one step closer to rationing supplies to industry — a step that would deliver a huge blow to the manufacturing heart of its economy.”

You’re in even more of a bind if you’ve just closed half of your nuclear power plants and insist on closing the rest within months even as your energy problems escalate.

“Currently, only three nuclear power plants are still connected to the grid in Germany,” Deutsche Welle reports. “As things stand, they will be shut down by the end of 2022 as part of the country’s complete withdrawal from the controversial energy source.”

The classical-liberal FDP, the smallest party in the coalition government, disagrees with this policy along with much else its partners do. But its officials have largely been reduced to a Cassandra role—ignored even as their prophecies come true. And that is how a country long committed to 100 percent renewable energy is getting ready to fire up the coal furnaces. Oh, and also for power rationing, colder homes, and less production.

“Whatever path Germany takes, the [German Institute for Economic Research], the scientific research center Forschungszentrum Jülich and the German Association of Energy and Water Industries (BDEW) all agree that a loss of Russian natural gas cannot be entirely replaced by other energy sources,” Deutsche Welle adds. “They say less energy must be consumed overall.”

Germany’s plight is disturbing testimony of where you can end up if you commit yourself to a vision of a “green” future that has no place in it for the most reliable source of clean-ish electricity. By contrast, neighboring France plans to build as many as 14 new nuclear reactors because of, not despite, its environmental goals. That attitude reflects energy analyst Marcus’s assessment and is shared by the inter-governmental International Energy Agency (IEA). “Long-term operation of the existing nuclear fleet and a near-doubling of the annual rate of capacity additions are required” to meet clean-energy goals by 2050, the organization specifies.

Visons of a cleaner future based on technologies that are more efficient and less polluting are praiseworthy and shared by just about everybody. But to get from here to there requires planning and realistic decisions. Unfortunately for the German people, most of their political leaders relied on strongly held wishes and pixie dust to bring a green utopia and are instead delivering literal lumps of coal.

Source: https://reason.com/2022/06/24/green-germany-prepares-to-fire-up-the-coal-furnaces/

The post ‘Green’ Germany Prepares To Fire Up the Coal Furnaces first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.